Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 156, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 June 1916 — UNITES THE COASTS [ARTICLE]

UNITES THE COASTS

REMARKABLE HISTORY OF LINE OF CANADIAN RAILROAD. Bystem Built Under Obstacles Which Appear Almost Insurmountable Is a Monument to the Skill of Its Engineer*. A strip a hundred miles wide, extending from coast to coast, was added to the attainable vistas of Canadian territory when the first train over the new Canadian Northern Transcontinental railroad rolled into Vancouver carrying 80 members of the Canadian parliament and some hundred other public officials, railroad engineers and newspaper men, assembled from all parts of Canada and the United States, to take part in the opening of a new era in the development of the Dominion. Since 1896 this new railroad system has been quietly and unostentatiously covering the middle section of Canada with a gridiron of steel rails. To the observant its trend and ultimate objective were plain. Yet outside of Canada and even in many sections of the Dominion it attracted so little attention that the progress of this first transcontinental train, triumphantly heralded throughout the continent, has been a revelation and a surprise. In part this is due to the manner of the system’s upbuilding.' It started 19 years ago with a modest 85-mile railroad from Gladstone to Dauphin, Manitoba. Its name was the Manitoba & Northwestern Railway and Canal. The canal part of it, by the way, never was built, and probably never will he. The railroad had a single track and a single passenger train which ran out of Gladstone in the morning as Train No. 1 and bravely returned in the afternoon as Train No. 2, and it was characteristic of the Scottish sense of Jid:. mor in the builders and proprietors that the time table contained a solemn notice that “Train No. 2 will not leave the terminal until after the arrival of Train No. 1.” It was also characteristic of their shrewdness that this particular 85miles of territory through which the railroad ran was already noted as the best land in the province and has since fully justified )♦« reputation.

This first little railroad made money, although the franchise for its construction had gone a-begging for years before it was started. There followed branch lines which doubled, then trebled, its traffic; then an extension to Portage La Prairie; then, more little railroads on the prairies, most of them on the same modest scale. . .

In course of time the proprietors of these lines went east and acquired the Great Northern railroad on the north shore of the St. Lawrence river, between Montreal and Quebec, tapping an immense pulpwood area. Then came more railroads and still more, until the Canadian Northern Railroad system, as these scattered lines had become, controlled more mileage in the three prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta than any other Canadian railroad. - It has since increased until it has 10,000 miles in all. —New York Times Sunday Magazine.